Food History

Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats (ed Karen Hess) is a lovely thing. You’ll hear more about it later on since I love it dearly, but today I decided you needed two recipes. I like the name of the first so you need the recipe. The second is because when I was typing up the biscuit recipe, lo these aeons ago, I caught sight of the blurb on the back of Hess’s book. It said “To make bisket.”

Spirit of Beazor

Beazor water is an excellent approoved antidote against all contagions of the plague, the purples, small pox, or measels. For preventing thereof 2 spoonfulls mixt with cardus or angellico water yt is stilld cold onely of the hearbs. & for want of these waters, use possit drink, which is provokeing towards sweat, & will expell the malignaty of mallady, the patient beeing kept temperately warm. It is alsoe good in a violent surfet, or when the stomack is oppressed with winde, cold, phleme, or any supefuilty. It is good for disgestion, to be drunk by it selfe. This is good for the stone in the kidneys by takeing 6 spoonfulls in halfe a pinte of small beer. It hath given present ease in the fits by remooveing it into the blather, & soon after caus.. oidance.

NB the bezoar stone has a wonderful history. More medicinal than culinary, so if I ever discuss it it will be in my other blog. I just couldn’t resist this recipe today :).

To make bisket

Take a pound of fine flowre of wheat, A pound of sugar, 4 whites of eggs & 8 youlks, & 4 spoonfulls of rosewater. The longer you beat it the better it will be. Then put it to eyther annyseeds or carraway seeds. You must beat it till it will bubble. The poure it in your plates. Then take some sugar finely beaten, & a little flowre, which you must put in a piece of tiffany (your sugar must be thrice as much as your flowre) & with this dust your plates of bisket before they are set into the oven.

I can’t resist a last bit of commentary. This cookbook was written using the same form as my grandmother’s cookbook. Abbreviations and skipped steps when everything was so obvious that it didn’t need spelling out. You do have to read home-written recipes with this in mind. Sometimes just one step is missed. In one scone recipe I have inherited, most of the recipe is gone and my sister and I couldn’t reconstruct it however much we tried.